Getting your driving license is not a problematic issue only because you have to study and then face the exams with the nerves that this entails, now the problem is that it is not possible to do it directly because there are more than 300,000 students waiting to take the exam.
This is basically because there are not enough examiners dealing with the candidates. The DGT has recently added 50 new ones to its ranks, which is good news, but it is not enough. And it is that, in the last 12 years, around 10% of the examiners who were working have been lost.
This has done nothing but create a huge collapse. There are currently 306,000 students waiting to be examined for their car licence, and in some provinces this implies a waiting time of up to 3 months.
The waiting list is now 14% lower than it was at the beginning of the year, but at the current rate from Formaster, Professional Association of Training Companies in Logistics, Transport and Road Safety; They point out that it would take 4 years for the waiting time to be “zero” and for all applicants to be able to be evaluated to obtain their cards.
Antonio Macedo, president of Formaster, has declared: “What began as a circumstantial incidence in some areas of Spain has become, since the pandemic, a structural problem in the driving school sector.”
“The waiting times for students to be examined for the practical driving test reach more than 3 months. Driving schools are a service to the community for the acquisition of a driving license and the DGT must solve this problem. However, we see that Traffic is not capable of responding to the demand for exams that it has”, he adds.
And he sentences: “It is true that he requests more personnel for his Headquarters, but public function does not grant him the required number of places, forcing that, in times like the summer months, in many provinces they have to suspend exams, something which also occurs in the months of December or Easter.